Flying Magazine grounded?

Feassarian

Feassarian

Filing Flight Plan
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Feassarian
Anyone else notice subscriptions to Flying Magazine are not available through any of the third-party magazine sites, but also the price has increased? Used to pickup a print subscription for about $11/yr, sometimes less for multi-year - mine expired last month so I went to renew and every website that carries the subscription now says no longer available and the main subscription site has increased to $30/yr - I know they have a new owner, but for a magazine that pays for distribution through advertising, yikes...

Disappointing, as I enjoyed the print edition - kinda like my print AOPA each month...
 
I believe they shifted to a 4 times per year model with a larger paper size. Hence the higher price. Makes no sense to me. Oh, and their email has shifted to a newsletter format, and is daily. No charge for that.
 
Ghery said:
I believe they shifted to a 4 times per year model with a larger paper size. Hence the higher price. Makes no sense to me. Oh, and their email has shifted to a newsletter format, and is daily. No charge for that.
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Yeah, terrible model!

"You will receive 4 print magazines per year with your membership, as well as a digital archive of previous print magazines through our iOS and Android apps (Coming Soon)."
 
IMHO, the new Flying magazine is boring and lacks interesting articles. It is mostly a host for advertising. It seems to have about a third of the content it had 20 years ago.

Somehow, I got a subscription to the print version without asking and it goes in the shredder after a quick read.
 
I won’t renew. I paid for 12 printed issues per the subscription card, and it didn’t say a word about format. If they won’t deliver the number of issues I paid for, then we’re finished.
 
IK04 said:
IMHO, the new Flying magazine is boring and lacks interesting articles. It is mostly a host for advertising. It seems to have about a third of the content it had 20 years ago.
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This is different than the old monthly boring and lacking interesting articles version?
 
So this begs the question if there remains any solid print sources for aviation news? AOPA isn't bad, but they have their agenda, which is often not encompassing the entire aviation industry.
 
Feassarian said:
So this begs the question if there remains any solid print sources for aviation news? AOPA isn't bad, but they have their agenda, which is often not encompassing the entire aviation industry.
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General Aviation News. Newspaper format, comes out 2x per month. My FBO gives out complementary copies.
 
Half Fast said:
General Aviation News. Newspaper format, comes out 2x per month. My FBO gives out complementary copies.
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Interesting you mention that one... I just started receiving it a couple months ago... You can get a free print subscription if you are a member of SAFE... Still getting used to the 'ol newspaper style and layout vs the flashy slick magazine print - but agree, its a good source...
 
Speaking of magazines, does anyone else have a compulsion to grab the complementary Luxe magazines from Signature or Atlantic FBOs? I like the irony of letting my passengers peruse private jets and Italian villas while crammed into the back seat of my Tiger with empty oil quarts on the floor.
 
IK04 said:
IMHO, the new Flying magazine is boring and lacks interesting articles. It is mostly a host for advertising. It seems to have about a third of the content it had 20 years ago.

Somehow, I got a subscription to the print version without asking and it goes in the shredder after a quick read.
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It’s like a pamphlet with aviation adverts these days. I’ve got a bunch of old ones from the 80s. Three times as thick with a variety of articles. Won’t be long before Flying goes full digital.
 
Half Fast said:
I won’t renew. I paid for 12 printed issues per the subscription card, and it didn’t say a word about format. If they won’t deliver the number of issues I paid for, then we’re finished.
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This is why I dropped EAA's Vintage Aircraft Association. I joined with a benefit of 12 printed issues and they suddenly decided to go to 6 issues. Not what I paid for.
 
Are there any aviation magazine subscriptions worth paying for?

Sent from my SM-A515U using Tapatalk
 
AOPAs rag wasn't bad but I dropped them for the ever increasing dues and the ever decreasing representation of my interests. The death of the red board was the last straw. EAA is doing quite well with Sport Aviation these days. It's greatly improved in the past three years. I'm a Vintage member, but I didn't join to get the magazine.
 
I gave up FLYING many years ago. They were concentrating heavily on airplanes I could never afford to fly anyway. I'd bet that most GA pilots are in that same category. We drive old cars so we can fly old airplanes......
 
Wasn't FLYING recently acquired by an enthusiastic new owner who was gonna revitalize the brand?

The sad thing is, there are so few new aircraft to demo, what do you do as a publisher in that niche?
 
Currently I’m tossing anything after 1970.

At one time I had about 40 flight reviews of the 172!

I do like some of the real old stuff.

Odd aircraft that never made it, fighting airspace grabs , all

the great things that were going to happen.
 
kyleb said:
Wasn't FLYING recently acquired by an enthusiastic new owner who was gonna revitalize the brand?

The sad thing is, there are so few new aircraft to demo, what do you do as a publisher in that niche?
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I heard an interview with him on Sporty’s I think… and he had grand plans… but not seeing it yet… to your question about content - there is massive amounts of content… the community is niche - sharing content is one way to grow awareness … air facts journal … bold method … guest instructors - use the flying brand to connect industry CFIs with new models and platforms to test and give feedback to - good for aspiring pilots and career pilots - there are lots of content options if they want them


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Used to have Flying but I dropped it. Now I just pick up a free copy at my FBO. My current subscriptions are Warbird Digest, Combat Aircraft Journal, Air & Space, AOPA and Sport Pilot. Use to be a good mag that P&P produced years ago called Pilot Journal but it got terminated after a few years. It was like an upscale version of P&P. Still have several copies at home because the articles were that good. Shame they let it go.
 
My first magazine, circa 1970 was an issue of FLYING. I remember seeing it at the drug store and conning Dad into buying it for me. My main interest was story about Richard Bach barnstorming the midwest. There were a ton of colorful photos with that story. There was an editorial where someone (Richard Collins?) opined that airplanes fly a lot better overweight than out of fuel, so if you have to err to one side or the other... There were several other interesting stories too. I think Dad bought me that magazine when I was right at the borderline of learning to read, so working through it was probably pretty good for me.

Years later, I picked up another copy of that same issue at Oshkosh in the fly-market. It is in one of my nostalgia piles around here somewhere.

The current version doesn't quite measure up.
 
Feassarian said:
I heard an interview with him on Sporty’s I think… and he had grand plans… but not seeing it yet… to your question about content - there is massive amounts of content… the community is niche - sharing content is one way to grow awareness … air facts journal … bold method … guest instructors - use the flying brand to connect industry CFIs with new models and platforms to test and give feedback to - good for aspiring pilots and career pilots - there are lots of content options if they want them
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Opinion: Flying (like Car and Driver, Road and Track, Wooden Boat, etc) is an aspirational magazine. It is about the airplane you'd buy if only you had an extra $$XX laying around. The trip you'd take if you had that airplane and a month off from work. The magazine is/was paid for by airplane manufacturers advertising to the few who could afford that next step. The rest of us got a discount ride. Economies of scale pretty much mean the ride is over.

Flight training and stuff like that isn't going to sell a lot of aspirational magazines.
 
I remember the glory days of Flying magazine -- the soaring poetry of Gill Robb Wilson; the "just-the-facts-Ma'am" reporting of Dick Weeghman; the humor of Frank Kingston Smith and later Gordon Baxter; and the early careers of such talents as James Gilbert and Richard Bach. With his innocent awe of flying and insatiable desire to educate himself to become a better pilot, Frank Kingston Smith stoked my passion for flying more than anyone else, rest his soul.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, the publication and its advertisers took aim squarely at the diamond-studded end of the general aviation spectrum. It might as well have been called "JetFlying". It made B&CA look like a hang-glider flyers' newsletter. I expected the masthead to repeat the words of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, "Flying an aeroplane with only a single propeller to keep you in the air. Can you imagine that?"
 
Flying Mag has gotten thinner and thinner, and cost more so they can get the adverts in my face.

Doctor’s would call it agonal respiration’s.
 
Pilawt said:
....the humor of.....Gordon Baxter
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Yup. I remember a column in which he did a pirep of a nice new airplane. Bonanza or Mooney, maybe. He was impressed by all the switches on the control yoke, and lamented that the only thing on his old Mooney's yoke was a big crack....
 
I actually really enjoy the magazine - at least the first half dozen articles that are applicable to the GA pilot.

However, no way I will be renewing. 4 times per year at a higher price? I'm not in it for the photos - the real life views are all I need for that.
 
IK04 said:
IMHO, the new Flying magazine is boring and lacks interesting articles. It is mostly a host for advertising. It seems to have about a third of the content it had 20 years ago.

Somehow, I got a subscription to the print version without asking and it goes in the shredder after a quick read.
Click to expand...

I thought Flying was boring in 1995.
 
So you guys who used to read flying... was Rob Mark's writing as annoying as he is on podcasts? I was really disappointed when they fired him as it gave him lots of time to ruin all the aviation pods I used to enjoy listening to.
 
“Frank Kingston Smith stoked my passion for flying more than anyone else, rest his soul.“

Ditto!
 
Rcmutz said:
“Frank Kingston Smith stoked my passion for flying more than anyone else, rest his soul.“

Ditto!
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I have three of Smith's books and they're excellent.

I also have a book published around 50 years ago called The Best of Flying. The magazine of today doesn't hold a candle to what it was back then. They have nowhere near the quality of writing, nor are the topics as interesting.
 
Half Fast said:
I have three of Smith's books and they're excellent.

I also have a book published around 50 years ago called The Best of Flying. The magazine of today doesn't hold a candle to what it was back then. They have nowhere near the quality of writing, nor are the topics as interesting.
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I think a lot of it has been watered down by lawyering. In a note earlier in the thread, I mentioned an old article from Richard Collins (I think), where he compared the alternatives of taking off over-gross vs taking off without adequate fuel reserves. At the end of the day, the conclusion was "Airplanes fly better slightly overloaded than they do out of gas" or something like that. So Collins was giving tacit approval (in a sense) for flying over-gross in certain situations. That's the kind of real-world opinion you'd never see today in an aviation publications, even though it is a dilemma faced by aviators every day. How many planes crash because they are out of fuel vs slightly over-gross? I bet 5 more gallons of fuel would have saved a lot of the accidental gliders and wouldn't have resulted in an offsetting number of crashes caused by over-gross conditions.

Anyway, the magazine has gotten far away from much of the adventurous "Let's go flying" tone it had years ago. I miss that.
 
Half Fast said:
I have three of Smith's books and they're excellent.

I also have a book published around 50 years ago called The Best of Flying. The magazine of today doesn't hold a candle to what it was back then. They have nowhere near the quality of writing, nor are the topics as interesting.
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I am also a big fan of the late Frank Kingston Smith. Weekend Wings, Flights of Fancy, I’d Rather Be Flying and my personal favorite, Weekend Wings, stand together in my Aviation Library. There is not a year that goes by that I haven’t re-read Weekend Wings at least twice, I treasure and enjoy it that much.

FKS gave a presentation at the Sun n Fun Fly-in one year as a guest speaker for the Short Wing Piper Club. My Dad and I got there early so we managed to get seats. For many others it was standing room only as the place was packed. He related the story of his first long cross country flight to Florida in a Tri-pacer. It was special to meet him and shake his hand.

His family scattered his ashes at Wings Field on the 50th (?) anniversary of his first solo flight there. His wife, Marianne, passed away in November 2020. I believe that all three of their boys, all Pilots like their dad, are still living.
 
Flying as well as Plane & Pilot are included in Apple News+, which is a subscription that includes lots of magazines. I browse them and read a few articles on my mini iPad. Sports Illustrated, some camera magazines, and so on.

Nice things about AppleNews+ are that it’s easy, it’s fast, and I don’t feel like I need to read everything in a magazine just because I paid for it. If there’s just one columnist or one article I want to read, that’s fine.
 
Half Fast said:
I have three of Smith's books and they're excellent.

I also have a book published around 50 years ago called The Best of Flying. The magazine of today doesn't hold a candle to what it was back then. They have nowhere near the quality of writing, nor are the topics as interesting.
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I was 16 back in 1973 when I first read Weekend Pilot. Knew I had to learn to fly after that. The C140 and then C170 has always held a soft spot in my heart because of FKS writing!
 
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